


The Machinery of Guidance

by Cephalopod



Category: Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo
Genre: M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-31
Updated: 2011-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-22 01:30:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephalopod/pseuds/Cephalopod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The opulence and decadence of the Count's own Eastern Quadrant hide his intentions toward Franz and Albert. The world turns strange to the sound of a harp and the spin of vast gears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Machinery of Guidance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hideincarnate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hideincarnate/gifts).



The Count's skiff plied the oil-gold ocean at leisure, traveling past islets and crags of jewelled rock far past the scope of anything that could be truly underneath Number 30 Champs Elysees without sorcery. Albert and Franz gaped openly as the celestial machinery wheeled overhead, its timing perfection, its ever-gyrating cascade reflecting bizarrely from the ripples at their prow. Solemnly, silently, Baptistin rowed on.

“I wonder what we'll see, so far out,” said Albert. The grandeur and impossibility of his surroundings had worked a change on his mood of enthusiasm, and the brightness of his tone had faded.

“The Count, I should hope,” murmured Franz. He had been uneasy from the start. He half-feared at any moment that the golden surfaces all around would twist and distort and the limitless reaches of hell would be revealed in their reflections. “Kind of him to invite us, but I wish he'd mentioned the occasion. Don't you think it's strange, Albert?”

“I think it's beautiful,” Albert replied. “Strange and beautiful, like a dream. All of this is certainly just a dream, Franz, don't you think so?”

Franz made no answer for a long moment. He watched Albert trail a hand in the water, which seemed to him a foolhardy temptation of the bizarre creatures that surely lived in it.

“I think that if this is a dream then, as usual, you've overslept,” he said finally, “and when you wake up we'll go have breakfast.”

Albert was delighted by this, and pulled his hand out of the sea to clasp Franz's in both of his. “Franz,” he said, with mock-sincerity, “you must come to _all_ my dreams, and be practical in them, and make sure I do what I should.”

“I can't make you less lazy,” Franz replied, pulling his hands free and settling back into the skiff with his arms behind his head. “ _Nothing_ can make you less lazy.”

Albert harrumphed and splashed a little water up over the bow at him. Franz made a great show of ignoring it entirely, and Albert sat back laughing.

They traveled on for a time after that, the hush over the water disturbed only by the faint plashes of Baptistin's oar. Years passed, or seemed to, as the great toothed wheels spun in eerie silence overhead.

“We draw near,” announced Baptistin, without so much as a 'sir'. “To the lady's quarters.”

An island loomed up from the horizon then, far more quickly than it could have done on a true ocean, loomed up as though called by the announcement itself. The structure upon it seemed for all the world to have been grown there. Certainly it had never been built, a branching construction of ornament piled upon ornament, all of it the fine sanguine coral so prized outside the Epirus Cluster and so skillfully employed by the craftsmen of that same distant land. The skiff drifted to a stop against a small pier that jutted from its base. Bowing, Baptistin handed them out of the boat.

Albert found himself hesitating on the pier. “And what shall we do now?”

Baptistin said nothing, smiled his lewd knowing smile, and shifted his weight against the skiff's pole in a way that Albert himself would have never dared in company. Behind him, Albert heard Franz stifle an indignant word. He turned to collect his friend's arm, and the two of them fled through the arched door of the tiny fortress into a room filled with shadows and curls of golden smoke.

The Count of Monte Cristo stood waiting for them there, dressed simply in a foreign robe of exquisite embroidery. Albert all but fell into his arms in relief; odd how all that had passed was a boat ride, how they were still somehow below Paris, and yet how it felt so like being delivered to a strange friendless land.

“A pleasure,” said the Count, swiftly detaching from the embrace and bowing in his customary formal manner to Franz. “You honor me by making the long journey.”

“Not at all,” replied Franz. He was determined not to be so humbled, as Albert had been, by his awe.

“You have oceans under your roof!” gushed Albert. He received an answering chuckle from the Count.

“Come, both of you. First, you shall don proper garments, and then Haydee will entertain you. I have tried to bring the Eastern Quadrant here for you, but you must make some small effort, still, to meet it.”

They passed together into a further room, where the two boys changed their coats for robes like the Count's in the light of a single red lantern suspended from the high ceiling on a chain of bronze. And then a long narrow hallway, dim and silent with carpeted floors and tapestried walls. And then a bronze-shod door thick as a ship's hull which swung open at the Count's touch. A harp played in the darkness inside.

Albert, who had re-acquired Franz's arm in the corridor without noticing he'd done so, pulled his friend closer. “Isn't this exciting?” he murmured. Less fervently, he added “and isn't it awfully warm?”

“Haydee wishes it so,” said the Count. The harp in the chambers ahead stilled at his words. "I allow her this."

Moments later the girl herself appeared, in an artfully draped garment of a sort neither Albert nor Franz had ever seen outside of holos. She bowed; the boys and the Count answered in kind.

“You are welcome here,” she said softly. “Please enter and accept what I may humbly offer.”

She led them into a large circular room, its dim interior crossed with shafts of caramel-colored sunlight through the high, square windows. A divan occupied one side of the room; here and there on the floor, a cluster of pillows for sitting. Three such pillows surrounded a low table supporting a narghile of great magnificence, its glass bowl cobalt and its chimney of chased gold. Albert seemed fascinated by it and went at once to tug at the little tubes from which one could draw smoke through coral mouthpieces. "Beautiful!" he said, thoroughly entranced. "How do you-"

The Count paid no heed to the question but rang a bell near the door, and at once entered a pair of servants with trays of unfamiliar liqueurs and sweetmeats. Bertuccio followed them with a casket in his hands and crossed straightaway to the pipe. So grave was his bearing and so ornate the case that Franz wondered whether they'd been brought a reliquary bearing the ashes of a pagan saint. In a trice the dainties were arranged, the narghile honored with its cargo and ignited, seething with the fragrance of tobacco and herbs; the Count merely murmured something to his valet and they were left alone again. Immediately Albert fell upon these treats, his curiosity more famished than his stomach.

Such strange flavors! Franz too tasted everything. A moss-colored liqueur so resinous it made his eyes burn. A slice of gelatine that melted to nothing in the mouth but a memory of seawater. A brown-skinned fruit, the flesh of which was candied in sugar and the pit, when cracked, yielded a red-brown syrup like marrow. A saucer of an oil that shimmered with a faint phosphorescence, but tasted of nothing at all. Franz had traveled. He had seen and eaten foreign things fit to brag of, but the Count's table was a masterpiece of exoticism. As usual the Count himself ate nothing, choosing only a glass of the bitter spirits. Haydee, too, took nothing. She occupied the divan, and attended with fastidious care to adjustments of her harp's tone.

In due course they exhausted the pleasures of food and drink and took up the tubes of the narghile to smoke. Haydee caressed her instrument as they did so. The tune she chose was a low one, full of the soft basso thrums of the harp's longest strings.

Franz found himself more at ease than he expected to be. They were still in Paris; the music and the room and this island with its coralline manor and the sea, all of it. Paris. Albert was here, relaxed as ever and chatting easily with the Count. Franz pulled another mouthful of the cool sugared smoke. He needn't worry so, surely. Albert wouldn't come to trouble, regardless of the Eastern Quadrant customs the Count enjoyed, so long as Franz could stay near.

He chuffed a laugh through his nose, which made a puff of smoke. Like a factory, or a dragon! That seemed hilarious, and he laughed aloud at it. The smoke whoofed out of his mouth in another puff and washed over Albert. Poor Albert! Franz found it hard to stop. Albert, too, erupted in laughter.

“I'll get you back for that!” declared Albert, grinning, and drew ferociously on the mouthpiece before blowing a plume of molasses-scented smoke directly over Franz. Retaliation was an absolute necessity, and the two boys created great clouds in their attempts to fumigate the other; finally Albert collapsed helpless with laughter into Franz's arms and blew out a last plume, warm, down the loose throat of Franz's robe. Wisps rose back up through the cloth. It seemed to Franz all at once that the air was nothing but smoke, that he was a creature of smoke himself and that the thrum of the harp had been the working of his own organs.

Albert's open mouth crossed his neck, wet.

“I,” said Franz.

And where had the Count gone? Where Haydee and her harp? Somehow the room had become still, save for he and Albert, and silent but for their breathing. Albert's cool hands slipped through the folds of Franz's robe, the heels of his palms digging against Franz's ribs. Franz pressed his own hands to Albert's chest where a girl's breasts would be, and found Albert's mouth flavored with smoke and bitter herbs. He would stay close. Albert would not come to trouble so long as he did.

 

*

 

The manor's shore bore a beach, a small crescent of coarse pewter sand, and it was there that Haydee and the Count watched the vast artificial sun blaze over the waters as it set, or feigned to set, in accordance with the machinery that governed it. Baptistin smoked a solitary cigarette on the pier some small distance further down the shore.

“My rooms,” said Haydee, without preamble. “As you know, they are yours. _Yours_ , my lord.” Her emphasis was unmistakable, her meaning clear: _not theirs_. “Were they able to serve your purpose?”

The Count shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps what has happened—is happening—will become useful in the course of my business in Paris. Perhaps it amused me.”

“Perhaps it did.” With a sigh, Haydee shaded her eyes and watched the sun's satellites wheel around it. “They are boys. They will make an awful mess. My most private place, used by strange young men—this is a heavy thing to command of your slave.”

The Count smiled. “You know you are free, Haydee. There is no slavery here.”

“The world is your slave, my lord.”

“As you say, Haydee.”

“And I would like new cushions.”


End file.
